Today, Ezekiel's Wheel. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.

As we close in on the Wright
Brothers' Centennial this Autumn of 2003, the
counter-claimants rise up. Whitehead, Langley,
Stringfellow, Maxim, Pearse, Montgomery, Broadbeck
— I won't even try to complete the list. So many
people got off the ground before the Wrights and so
many more claimed to've done so.

Instead, let's meet a Texas claimant, the Reverend
Burrell Cannon. Writer Michael Hall tells how the
52-year-old Cannon decided, in 1900, that he'd been
called by God to replicate Ezekiel's Wheel. Cannon
had been running a lumber mill in the East Texas
town of Pine. He'd also spent fifteen years
studying the Book of Ezekiel, and now he set out to
build an Ezekiel Wheel flying machine.

He was businessman enough to know he'd need money
and backers. So he sold his mill and moved to the
nearby cotton center in Pittsburgh, Texas. There he
preached -- both the Gospel and his
aeroplane. The times, says Hall, were optimistic.
He found backers.

Cannon sold $25,000 worth of stock, starting at $25
a share, and he began building a one-man 26-foot
prototype. But his real goal was far more
ambitious. He meant to create a 125-foot machine
capable of carrying twenty tons. And, using God's
own design, how could he fail? Cannon finished his
prototype aeroplane.

It was quite a machine -- an almost-circular
flying-wing, with a secondary lower wing below. The
supporting structure was a light tubular metal
frame. The Book of Ezekiel had spoken of the
construction being "as it were a wheel within a
wheel." It'd gone on to say, "the spirit of the
living creature was in the wheels." So Cannon
created two pairs of wheels, nested below the
wings.

The animating spirit, an eighty horsepower engine,
was placed between the wheels. The outer pair of
wheels was eight feet in diameter. They taxied the
airplane up to takeoff speed. The inner pair was
smaller and faster moving -- a set of paddle wheels
was meant to drive the aeroplane once it was
airborne.

That might set off alarm bells. Paddle wheels work
on a steamboat because they push against the water
at the bottom, then coast around through the air on
top. But Cannon devised means for retracting the
paddles in the upper return stroke. He also meant
to control the machine in flight by varying the
paddle speeds.

Then, in 1902, one of Cannon's workers flew the
machine. It gained speed, took off, seemed to drift
in the air, began vibrating violently, and then
crashed into a fence. The flight, if you can call
it that, had covered a distance of 167 feet.

And so Cannon lost his backers and moved back to
Pine — with his airplane. But he was at it again,
nine years later — more backers, another airplane.
This one crashed into a telephone pole. Hall ends
his surreal story with a marvelous paraphrase. He
says, "Cannon's reach exceeded his grasp — by an
inch or by a mile. It doesn't matter. What's a
heaven for?"

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.

The relevant text in the Book of Ezekiel (King
James Version, 1:15-23) is:Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold
one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures,
with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels
and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl:
and they four had one likeness: and their
appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in
the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went
upon their four sides: and they turned not when
they went. As for their rings, they were so high
that they were dreadful; and their rings were full
of eyes round about them four. And when the living
creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when
the living creatures were lifted up from the earth,
the wheels were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit
was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to
go; and the wheels were lifted up over against
them: for the spirit of the living creature was in
the wheels. When those went, these went; and when
those stood, these stood; and when those were
lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up
over against them: for the spirit of the living
creature was in the wheels. And the likeness of the
firmament upon the heads of the living creature was
as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched
forth over their heads above. And under the
firmament were their wings straight, the one toward
the other: every one had two, which covered on this
side, and every one had two, which covered on that
side, their bodies.

A different vision of Ezekiel's Wheel from M.
Merian, Iconum Biblicarum, Frankfort,
1627.